How would you know where to find the best pages of a book? Grubby pages? Contents pages? Bent corners?
Today we’ve published the “Top 30” best ranked Help & Support pages used on the Portal.
You can find these here :
http://www.plus.net/support/customer_service/using/top30.shtml
Of course it wouldn’t be right for us to not show the pages you don’t like, so we’ll show a list of the worst offenders shortly. We’re always trying to make our pages better and we welcome your feedback to help us to do that.
Come and talk to us on the Discussion Forums if you have any ideas!
Kelly Dorset, (insert this week’s job title here ;-)), posted the following update to the Web Portal Team blog regarding the ongoing saga with signup…
“The more eagle-eyed of you lot out there may have spotted on our Service Status posts that we’ve been trying to roll out the new sign up process this week, but haven’t actually seen anything go live. Nope, it’s still not quite live yet.
So, what’s the problem?
We’ve been working on this since August. It’s obviously a fairly major projects and is tied very heavily into our new PHP5 framework code. A lot of our problems have been down to the complexity of functionality that our sign up process expects from the Framework. We’ve had to make quite a few changes to this bit of code and that has several knock on effects.
An example of this is that our Faults Automation code, which is built upon the framework and integrates with BT, has needed quite a bit of change to keep it compatible. So, not only are we having to test the new sign up process in depth, we are needing to test the Faults process end to end as well. As BT don’t have a test platform which we can use for this testing, we have to use what we call ‘mock services’ to emulate this testing. These mock services are notoriously fickle and issues with them can set our testing back significantly (rest assured, all problems discovered are being pushed back into improvements to our testing platform.)
Anyway, lots of things that interact, lots of things to test, leads to quite an intensive testing cycle, and quite a scary rollout. I think we’ve now simulated the live rollout about 15 times on our staging platform!
We did attempt a full rollout last night, only to be hampered with a bug preventing business signups from working. When we couldn’t quickly resolve the issue, we made the decision to halt the rollout as we cannot afford to allow the project rollout to slip into the working day. The guys are back in now working on replicating the problems and fixing them. Once we are happy, we’ll attempt a roll again soon.
Cross your fingers for us!“
Fingers crossed here in Comms! Keep your eyes peeled on Service Status for announcement of our next try!
The more eagle-eyed of you lot out there may have spotted on our Service Status posts that we’ve been trying to roll out the new sign up process this week, but haven’t actually seen anything go live. Nope, it’s still not quite live yet.
So, what’s the problem?
We’ve been working on this since August. It’s obviously a fairly major projects and is tied very heavily into our new PHP5 framework code. A lot of our problems have been down to the complexity of functionality that our sign up process expects from the Framework. We’ve had to make quite a few changes to this bit of code and that has several knock on effects.
An example of this is that our Faults Automation code, which is built upon the framework and integrates with BT, has needed quite a bit of change to keep it compatible. So, not only are we having to test the new sign up process in depth, we are needing to test the Faults process end to end as well. As BT don’t have a test platform which we can use for this testing, we have to use what we call ‘mock services’ to emulate this testing. These mock services are notoriously fickle and issues with them can set our testing back significantly (rest assured, all problems discovered are being pushed back into improvements to our testing platform.)
Anyway, lots of things that interact, lots of things to test, leads to quite an intensive testing cycle, and quite a scary rollout. I think we’ve now simulated the live rollout about 15 times on our staging platform!
We did attempt a full rollout last night, only to be hampered with a bug preventing business signups from working. When we couldn’t quickly resolve the issue, we made the decision to halt the rollout as we cannot afford to allow the project rollout to slip into the working day. The guys are back in now working on replicating the problems and fixing them. Once we are happy, we’ll attempt a roll again soon.
Cross your fingers for us!
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been compiling a list of usability problems with the portal and drawing up some recommendations. I ran a workshop today to present the findings to the rest of the portal team (and half a dozen other folks).
Most of what I said had been said before. Everyone knows that the site could be a lot better. In many cases we already know what needs to be done to improve it. The stumbling block was the lack of an overall vision and somebody to oversee the execution of that vision.
As PlusNet’s new resident usability ‘expert’ I hope to fix that! We now have a record of the issues, we’re working on putting our vision into words, and I’m responsible for making sure we continue going forwards.
In Wojtek’s words: the portal revolution has begun…
Further to last month’s presentation of results (available here). The results of this month’s Customer Support Feedback Survey have been collated.
In particular, I personally feel the following acheivements are worthy of a special mention :
Recorded Messaging at Start of Call
Evidently the effectiveness of this is much better
Was your call answered as quick as expected?
More people now say “Yes”, than “No”!
How long were you waiting?
Huge decline in longer wait times
Agents’ adapted approach to the call
Increase in effectiveness of this
Going forwards, we will publish the results of this survey where possible. But, a big well done to all in the CSC!
Here’s the Presso! (1.3Mb, PPT)
(if you can’t open this, get the viewer here!)
Quite often overlooked are the smaller brands picked up when we acquired Parbin (Metronet) back in November 2005.
We think it’s time to give them some focus! So our eMarketing team have been working on a snazzy reskin for Just The Name, the domain registrar now part of the PlusNet family. Not only that, but we’re building a brand new platform for it to live on.
What do you think? View the Prototype Here. Currently scheduled to launch in the next 6 weeks.
Current website is available at http://www.just-the-name.co.uk
OK. So we know the speedtester on the Portal is a little… erm… dated! Time for a new, shiny, replacement we think.
The current solution wasn’t really designed for anything above 512k speeds - and is affected by a number of newer Internet Security software programs and firewalls.
So, we’ve purchased and are currently in the process of setting up a new Speedtester based on Ookla (http://www.ookla.com) - the people behind Speedtest.net and the BBMax Speedtest.
Cue Prototype…
Hardware is currently on order that we plan to locate in London. This means that results won’t be affected by any congestion on the Sheffield > London link. The tester will sit on it’s own resilient platform and we’ll also be opening it up for public use too - hopefully!
Phase I of this project should launch within the next month or so, at : http://www.mybroadbandspeed.co.uk
More soon…
Although it has been over a week since we last updated the blog, we haven’t been doing nothing.
Tam has been doing a usability analysis of the portal and website (not the Member Centre section yet) and has fed back some initial comments to the rest of the Web Team.
Cam has been continuing to work on the new signup project, which has been delayed due to problems running some of the tests required.
Colin has been continuing to work on “Priority Problems on the Portal” which has now started being coded, with the workplace side mostly done but untested… next comes the customer-facing side.
Also, as people may have noticed from the Portal today, the PlusNet Family is 10 Years Old today. A big round of applause has to be given to the content and design team who managed to successfully roll out everything on the portal this morning after finding out yesterday morning that it was going out a day early!
Over the course of the next 8 weeks, BT will be performing maintenance on almost all DSLAMs and exchanges in the country. This work will take place on one particular night per each batch of exchanges and could result in downtime from around Midnight - 6am once for each DSLAM.
The following spreadsheet details affected Exchanges / DSLAMs and the date(s) that they will be affected.
Maintenance Calendar (Excel Spreadsheet File, Download Viewer)
Please note : Unfortunately we are unable to find out which DSLAM customers are connected to.
Always nice to get a mention in the news (well - most of the time!) 
Featuring PlusNet, The Guardian look at what ‘Unlimited’ really means :
Also on the Front Page of the Technology section in print apparently.
And, a couple of other links that picked up on this article :
- Broadband Reports
- Think Broadband
All in all - interesting reading!
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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